Alan Kay makes reference to Doug Engelbart's 1968 "Mother of All Demos."<p>I show that demo to all the new members of my UX team at work, to remind them of where we come from, and to show some brilliant ideas in computing that still don't work as well today.<p>In it, he is able to manipulate data without "opening" and "saving" documents, he just writes data as naturally and seamlessly as one might jot a note on a pad of paper.<p>Also, and this is what really floors me - he is able to share his screen with a remote user, and vice versa - it's built into the system. In 2011, we <i>still</i> need to install software on each machine to do this, and there's no universal standard for the action of simply <i>sharing your dang desktop with someone else.</i><p>Englebart, Alan Kay, Ivan Sutherland, Jef Raskin - all giants. I'm so happy to see their work continue to be studied and celebrated.<p>Edit: I didn't say, but should have--thank you old_sound for sharing this, I would have never seen it otherwise.
Follow up with Kay's OOPSLA 1997 keynote <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521" rel="nofollow">http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521</a> , "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet". "The Early History of Smalltalk" <a href="http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html" rel="nofollow">http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html</a> is background material for both talks.
Note: All videos in the course are available in podcast-friendly version on <a href="http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2011-B-26281&semesterid=2011-B" rel="nofollow">http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=...</a><p>A whole lot of them on <a href="http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php" rel="nofollow">http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php</a>
I've seen this demo before but had to watch it again. Alan Key's incredible. He invented the iPad before Star Trek did :)<p>It also reminded me that I should really get on with learning smalltalk.<p>Also Brian Harvey's full class is pretty good, haven't watched all of them yet but the guy is a good lecturer.